IntelliJ - Ant integration

The fact that IntelliJ is off-the-shelf ready to work with Ant is a great, great feature. It's also simple to configure and use.

Assuming that you already know how to use Ant, and you have a build.xml file ready to go, just follow these steps to (a) configure your build script to run from within IntelliJ, and (b) run Ant:

Assuming you're in an IntelliJ project, select 6: Ant Build from the slide-in menu bar ("Tool Window Bar") on the right side of your screen.

Click the large plus sign icon to add your build.xml file to IntelliJ's list of known build scripts for this project.

Navigate the filesystem until you find your build script (i.e., your build.xml file for this project). Select that file.

To run a desired Ant task, double-click the task name that you want to run. My main task is usually named deploy, so I double-click that.

Ant should run properly for you, and deploy your application.

It's really that simple.

The worst problem I've run into so far is that when I work on projects on multiple computer systems, my build scripts rely on an environment parameter named ANT_HOST_NAME existing. So, when my build script failed the first time, I said "Oh, dummy Al, you need to set your ANT_HOST_NAME environment parameter. Once I did this and restarted IntelliJ, the Ant build process worked like a champ.